Ghosts of Jets Past visit Rex Ryan as he tosses in towel on playoffs after loss to Falcons

An angry Rex Ryan chucks a football after Jets' 10-7 loss to the Falcons on Sunday - and verbally throws in the the towel on his team reaching the playoffs. (Antonelli/News)

The coaches change, the players change, even the extraordinarily creative ways the Jets come up with to lose these games change. It's holiday time in New York and another season has been ruined by the annual visit of the Ghosts of Jets Past.

It has been going on for over 40 years now. Those devious little ghosts brought down a great coach like Bill Parcells. Remember how the Jets had a 10-point lead in the third quarter of the AFC title game 11 years ago in Denver and were 27 minutes from the Super Bowl and ended up losing by 13? The ghosts frightened Parcells off the Jets sideline after just three seasons.

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The ghosts were too much for ordinary coaches like Bruce Coslet and future national championship coaches like Pete Carroll, run off after one year when Leon Hess couldn't resist Rich Kotite, who then became the worst coach in Jets history .

Al Groh bailed out after one year. Herm Edwards was asked to leave after five, even though he made the playoffs three times. Even a happy-go-lucky fellow like Eric Mangini couldn't find a way to fight off those powerful ghosts.

And now it's Rex Ryan's turn to find out that you can take this job promising a visit to the White House but usually end up making an appointment with some football shrink. Especially when rookie quarterback Mark Sanchez is so reckless and careless with the ball that he leaves absolutely no margin of error for a defense that has now cracked three times this season at crunch time.

Ryan tossed in the towel on the playoffs Sunday, even though the Jets are mathematically alive with the Dolphins and Broncos losing, making the 10-7 loss to the Falcons even more nauseating.

"We're obviously out of the playoffs and that's unfortunate," Ryan said.

Even if he felt that way, Ryan never should have verbalized it. Those words give the appearance that he's giving up on his team, something a coach can never do.

His eyes looked a little red at his news conference. I asked him afterwards if he got emotional in his postgame speech with his players. "I don't know about emotional," he said. "I was a little (ticked) off."

On a play that now will have its own name in Jets history - Fourth-And-6 - the rookie coach knew the ball was going to future Hall of Famer Tony Gonzalez when Atlanta, which found out 12 hours earlier that it had been eliminated from the playoffs, called timeout with 1:42 left. Ryan's beloved defense needed one stop from its own 6-yard line.

Ryan called what he felt was the perfect zone defense: a Jet in front of Gonzalez, one to the outside and one to inside. Nobody bothered to bump Gonzalez at the line, as they had been doing the entire game, and Gonzalez just ran to an open spot in the end zone. The defense didn't bother to converge on him and Matt Ryan had one of the easiest touchdown passes of his life.

"What a surprise, Gonzalez gets it in the red zone," Ryan said.

The Jets, of course, had no business losing to a team that has its bags packed. But the Jets botched three field goals. Kellen Clemens dropped the snap on the first one after Ryan elected not to go for it on a fourth-and-goal from the 1 with a 7-3 lead in the second quarter. Feely went wide right from 38 yards on the final play of the first half, and a 37-yarder was blocked after a high snap in the fourth quarter. Ryan exonerated Feely, the Jets' third best player this season after Darrelle Revis and Thomas Jones, from fault on his two misses.

The Jets have lost some incredible games this season. The two to Miami. The overtime game to Buffalo. The home game against the Jags. And then Sunday. But you can close your eyes and see this act so many times before. The holiday season usually brings new movies and box-office hits, but the Jets keep relying on the same script.

Now they go to Indianapolis trying to keep slim playoff hopes alive against the undefeated Colts. If Jim Caldwell plays to win instead of allowing Peyton Manning just to make a cameo appearance, does anybody think the Jets have any shot? Manning vs. Sanchez is not a fair fight.

The one thing Sanchez has been consistent about this season is taking the blame - that does show accountability - and saying he makes bad decisions. At this point in his rookie year, the Jets deserve better decisions. He threw three more interceptions Sunday, including the one that ended the Jets' season on the possession after Gonzalez's go-ahead TD.

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It was third-and-13 from the Jets 21. He was intercepted at the Jets 43. "Maybe I was trying to look a little too far down the field when it's a four-down territory situation," he said. "It's just one of those things you have to remember."

Come on now. Why didn't he remember that before the play? Ryan took the blame for Sanchez's first pick, which came on his first series when he threw into double coverage.

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"Terrible decision," Sanchez said. Ryan said, "We should have had him in a different state of mind," meaning it should have been code red, not code green. But shouldn't Sanchez know these things on his own by now?